mkraemer wrote:
It's mainly that my winrate was perhaps 0.5% to 1% in earlier days and although I still play horribly most of the time it is now closing 10%.
For what it's worth, I gave .10 a try and found it to be tactically very easy compared to .16. However, the tedium of constantly managing weight and item slots, managing missile stacks (ugh ugh ugh), IDing wands/potions/scrolls, dealing with item destruction...etc, made it seem harder. Well, it was harder, but it was not harder not in a fun way. Not wanting to invest the time and energy into playing very conservatively (such as not dropping potions and scrolls when not absolutely needed) can really hurt later in the game, making it harder to win. As an example, I was in Pan with preservation and all of my 4-5 recharge scrolls (for my wand of healing) and forgot about them when I fought Cerebov. I had 0 recharge scrolls afterward, and that hurt. I only discovered that when I was in Hell and really needed some more healing. Is that a good way to make a game harder? Haha your scrolls got burned up because you forgot to drop them before the fight. I don't think so. I am so glad that crap is gone.
And, fittingly,the character died of starvation after getting the 15th rune. Did I have food? Yes, but I had left most of it behind to reduce weight, and so when I got hungry I had to travel from Hell to get to it. I happened to die on exactly the turn that got me onto the tile with food. Really quite poetic, if you ask me. It sums up the old game quite nicely. There were choices to be made, but so many were related to the tedium of item management that, for me anyway, it was less fun.
One factor that may make recent versions seem easier is that that the knowledge base of the online community is much larger and higher quality than it used to be. It is easy to post a question online and get a fast and helpful answer from many sources. When I started playing, people were of course willing to help, but they were still figuring out how to play the game (and to deal with the myriad eccentricities). So the advice was not necessarily helpful.